The present invention relates generally to telecommunication services and, more particularly, to a system and method for remote provision of telephony services, such as Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) services.
There is an ever increasing trend by telecommunications service providers, such as a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), to provide advanced telephony services at remote locations, such as locations outside their usual service territories. These advanced services generally can include any service above providing a dial tone, and CLAS features and information services providing sport scores, time or day or weather; voice-mail; busy don""t answer; paging services; voice recordation and playback to third parties; speech or voice recognition; or recognition of dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signals, or the like. In order to provide advanced telephony services, an advanced service platform is required. To provide advanced services to geographically remote customers, the advanced service platform must be located either locally, e.g., at the central office of the service provider; or remotely, e.g., in a competing RBOC""s territory where the service is to be provided.
If the advanced service platform is to be located remotely, the service provider must incur a considerable expense. FIG. 1 shows a map 10 illustrating exemplary geographically distributed advance service platforms. In the example shown, a service provider maintains a local service territory 11, for example, generally located in the Midwest. To provide remote services in other areas, such as California or Texas, remote service nodes (SNs) 12, 13 must be located outside the service provider""s territory 11. These service nodes can include any type of server capable of implementing the advanced service processors. In addition to providing remote platforms, any time changes or repairs are required at the remote service nodes, service representatives from the service provider would have to be dispatched, which would add to the cost of providing the advanced service at the remote location.
Alternatively, advanced services can be provided to remote locations by redirecting calls, for example, cross country to the locale of the telecommunication service provider. This arrangement is illustrated in FIG. 2, where calls are redirected to the local telecommunication service provider local advanced service platform 14. Calls within its territory 11 are redirected from various the remote locations where the service is provided. This situation requires leased private lines, virtual private networks or re-routing and/or call forwarding over existing long distance or toll lines. These options are relatively expensive, and thus, would add to the cost of providing advanced services at a remote location by way of an advanced service platform located within the provider""s territory. Thus, a need has arisen to provide advanced services at remote locations without requiring remotely located advanced service platforms and less expensive than known systems or call re-routing.